Weeds

I slouched back on a couch and watch an inebriated Alfonso play Marvel vs. Capcom against another inebriated guy. It was 3:30 AM, just an hour and a half after we all got some Mexican food and celebrated the end of our dance camp’s July session. The impromptu kickback at an apartment of a dancer we hardly ever talked to already started to die. At least, it was dying until a few others came through the door with a fresh bag of greens.

No one wasted any time. In less than a minute, people were already lighting up a bong.

After taking a few hits, one particular dancer named Walden planted himself next to me on the couch. “Since you refused to drink,” he said to me, “you have to get high.”

I rolled my eyes. “No,” I told him.

“Com’n, just one hit!”

I folded my arms. “No, and don’t bother trying. You’re not going to convince me.”

“Look, I don’t want to convince anyone to try anything that they haven’t ever done before, which is why I’m leaving your friend Kelvin alone over there, but you said you’ve tried it once before. Why not do it again?”

“Because I didn’t like it my first time.”

“Why didn’t you like it?”

“It’s complicated and it’ll take forever to explain. So just know, I didn’t like it before, and I’m not going to like it now.”

“Maybe you didn’t smoke with the right people. Maybe you need to smoke it with uuuh-uh-uh-us.” He motioned at some people standing in the kitchen chatting amongst themselves. I looked at Jacob, who was sitting on another couch taking a hit. He looked up at me and shook his head, cautioning me not to give in.

“It’s not about the people,” I said. “It’s about smoking itself. It’s the effects that I don’t like.”

“What’s wrong with the effects?”

“Look, my full reason is long and convoluted, so I’ll just tell you this: I like reality the way it already is, and I hold my perception of it really dearly to me. I don’t let anything or anyone come and change my reality and the way I perceive it. Okay?”

“So you won’t even take just one hit?” Walden asked.

“No, I won’t.”

Walden dropped his shoulders and sighed. “Ok, fine.” He lifted himself off the couch and left somewhere outside.

I sat there quiet, still slumped in my seat and twiddling my thumbs. With Walden out of my face, I buried myself deep into my thoughts, deep enough to seriously consider whether or not I wanted to do this.



“Realize what?” Trung asked.

My eyes followed a bright green sign until it disappeared over the roof of my car. Two miles until the Bay Bridge, a four-mile menace that hung some several hundred feet over a deep dark boundless body of treacherous waters. I took several deep breaths and grasped my steering wheel with both hands.

“Maybe I was wrong,” I paused to take a breath and noticed that my emotions were starting to overwhelm me. “And maybe I’ve been wrong the last entire two years.”

“Well hell yeah you’ve been wrong!” Trung chastised me. “Rainy was pretty much all you could ask for in a guy. Dancer, singer, Filipino, not a douchebag, yet you broke up with him! And for what, Brian. For what?”

“Well it was because—”

“It was so you could continue calling special ed kids stupid! So that you could make fun of students with mental disabilities for not being as smart as other kids their age.”

I kept my hands glued to the steering wheel. The last exit before the Bay Bridge was approaching in less than half a mile. Should I use this chance to escape? “It’s more than that,” I tried to rationalize. “It was about the way I think, the way I see things, which was what Ranier tried to change. And you know that I can’t let go of the way I see things. It makes me who I am, and who I’ve been for a really long time. I made a sacrifice and...”

“And what?”

There was no use rationalizing, especially since I already admitted the truth to myself. “Like I said, I—I’m wrong. I...I made the wrong choice.” My throat throbbed.

“Look Brian, I know this whole thing with you calling special ed kids stupid and your rationale for doing it—I know that this is you, that this is something you can’t and won’t change for a really long time, but...” Trung looked at me and noticed my lips quivering. “...Are you okay?” he asked.

I barely uttered the “f” in “I’m fine” when I felt every little bit of anguish pent inside of me come bursting out in an embarrassingly high-pitched wail. Tears immediately streamed down my face.

“Brian!” Trung lifted both his hands as if to do something, but his seatbelt restrained him.

“I’m...” A pant accompanied each syllable, and each syllable came out distorted by my struggle to fight back more sobbing. “I’m. Fucking. Fine. God fucking damn it!” I pried one hand off the steering wheel so I could wipe off my tears, and shielding my face from Trung, I wept under my breath and panted through my nose.

“Brian...” Trung sighed. He placed his hand on the back of my head and rubbed it gently. “It’s okay, Brian. Let it all out...and maybe you should get off the freeway before we get onto the Bay Bridge.”

I looked through the rearview mirror to see the last exit disappear behind me. It was too late to get off. But that didn’t matter. I opened my mouth and breathed out, letting the cries stagger out.



I leaned forward on the couch and scratched my head. “Alfonso,” I said. “I wanna take a hit.”

Alfonso, bong in hand, exchanged a glance with Kelvin. “Wait, what?” Kelvin said. “Did Walden change your mind?”

“No, he didn’t. Just pass me the bong.” Alfonso sat down next to me with the bong, and Jacob came over to ask me if I really wanted to do this. “Yeah,” I told him. “Don’t question my reasons. Just light it up.”

The Gummy Octopus

Our teacher sat in her big red comfy chair, and we sat on the floor. We looked up at her. She held something in her hand. A clear tub with a bunch of colors inside.

She said, in Vietnamese, “Do you know what this is?” she lifted the tub up.

I tried to see more inside of it, but there was a really big fat sticker covering the front part of it.

A student raised his hand, and the teacher called on him. He said, “I think the label says... gummy...oc-to-...”

“Gummy octopuses!” she smiled. “It’s the second week of first grade, and we just had our first English spelling test last Friday. Every week, I’m going to award each student who gets an eighty percent or better on his test with a gummy octopus.”

Gummy octopus! Eighty percent or better! I scooted up to the front and smiled really big. She smiled back and read a list of names. They got the gummy octopuses. I listened for my name.

She read: “Tuan, Alexis, Ly, Qui, Ben, Bao, Joanna, Trang, Phuc, and Daisy.” They all got up to get their gummy octopuses. I waited for my teacher to say more names.

They all sat down, and I still waited. She put the lid back on the tub and put it away, and she told us to go back to our seats. No more gummy octopuses for today.

I stopped smiling and felt sad. I wanted to say something but I didn’t know what to say. I must of got a seventy-nine percent. But I thought I did really good! One of the spelling words was ‘turkey,’ and I put ‘red’ instead because I thought that was a more better word. Maybe next week, I’ll get a gummy octopus.



The clock ticked 1 AM when I sat down on the floor in the middle among twenty other dancers. Tired, sweaty, and hungry, we had just danced our way through an intense four and a half hours, and now we all wanted to leave, go eat, and go back home. But now we all waited anxiously as our captains reviewed all their notes and made their final decisions about who they would cast in which of our set’s seven pieces.

I had been taking dance classes five days a week all throughout June. I drove to Covina for classes at Stylz Studio Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, and on Tuesday and Thursday I drove to La Habra for a one-month long session of dance camp from Team Millenia. The classes at Stylz were no more than classes, but the choreography that I learned with Team Millenia would actually be put together in a performance for a big showcase of all the TM dance camp sessions at the end of the summer, like the Funksters Summer Intensive dance camp I took (and whined about a lot) last summer. Throughout the month we had been auditioning for each piece, and tonight, we auditioned for our last two. The captains had waited until the very end of the session to tell us which pieces we were chosen for, and now, they were going to reveal who got into what piece.

My friend Angela sat down next to me. “What pieces do you think you’ll get into?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. We’ll see. I don’t wanna get my hopes up.” Secretly though, I knew I’d be disappointed if I didn’t get into like at least two because then I would feel like I didn’t improve at all since last summer.

Then I learned that by default, each dancer got into at least three pieces. So I’d be disappointed if I didn’t get four or more.

Our two captains stood up in the front with their lists, ready to read us names. “Alright, so we’re going to go through each piece and read the ones who got casted in them. Ready? We’re starting with TL’s piece, so listen for your name.”

They went through the names in alphabetical order, so when they read “Brent” followed by “Cameron,” I sighed and dropped my shoulders a little. Then they went through the list for the next piece. Again, they skipped from “Binh” to “Carly.”

“...and Randy. That’s it for CJ’s piece. Now we’re going to read names for Will’s contemporary piece. We only chose thirteen dancers for this one. Congratulations to Adriana...”

When I auditioned for this the previous week, the judges told me that I really, really surprised them in a great way. I wasn’t too sure if I could believe them, because my body was made too awkwardly and too inflexibly for contemporary. So, I didn’t get my hopes up for this one.

“...Ben, Brian—”

My eyes widened.

“OOOOOH SHIT!” my friends all turned toward me with their high-five hands already raised.

“Congrats dude,” Alfonso patted me on the back. I shrugged. I had yet to get my default number of pieces, so I didn’t want to think much of getting into this one piece, yet.

Then I got into the next piece. Alright, I was in two.

The captains started on the list for a piece that we auditioned just today and only had two days to practice. Maybe no one else practiced it really thoroughly, because I got into that one too.

There were two more pieces left that I might’ve been casted in. I wondered if I was in at least one of them. That one more would mean a lot. If I didn’t get it, then I’d have trouble convincing myself that I didn’t just get relegated to my three current pieces by sympathetic default. But if I did get that fourth piece, then I could turn my interpretations completely around and think that it was not the captains, but me who put in the time and effort to place myself in the pieces.

I didn’t get the second to the last one. Instead, I got the outro, my fourth piece. I closed my eyes and breathed a sigh of relief. Once the captains finished reading their lists, all the dancers around me erupted into chatter about what pieces they got into. My friends were still congratulating me about managing to get into the contemporary piece, but now, at this point I just wanted to go eat and then sleep.

My friends and I did eat, but then we all got invited to party/have a kickback with the other TM dance camp dancers, but what ensued was a totally different story.

What All Guys Want

It was 3 AM in the morning on a Saturday night (May 15), which was apparently a really busy time for this particular restaurant in Garden Grove. Alex, Khoa, Daniel, Angela, and I—we were three single guys, a taken guy, and a taken girl, all crowded around a table over warm bowls of Pho. We were discussing one of our favorite subjects.

“It’s only the fat creeper girls that holler at me when I’m drunk. Why me?”

“Angela, tell me how to get girls! I want anything—hook up, one night stand, dating, or a relationship. Just help me get a girl!”

“Man Brian, you’re lucky. You can get sex any time you want because guys are always horny all the time, right?”

“Yeah,” I said as I tried to chopstick pho noodles into my spoon. “All the time, any time.”

“Man, I’m so envious of you.”

I smiled, nodded, and slurped on my Pho.



Chauncer Hien. New friend on downelink. I thought this was going to be another “whatever-I’ll-probably-never-talk-to-you” add until he actually asked to hang out with me. I figured, ok sure. It was only the third week of the quarter, so I had enough free time.

He came by my apartment on a Wednesday afternoon. I had thought he was only going to pick me up, but he actually insisted on coming inside. He had to spray paint a small wooden house for one of his classes, so I let him used my bathtub. While waiting for the house to dry, he lay down on my bed, and that was when I first suspected that he wanted some bang bang:

“Do you want a massage? I give really good massages.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Nah, no thanks.”

After hanging out for a little bit, I left to go to the library to watch Le Retour de Martin Guerre for French class. I didn’t talk to Chauncer again until later that night when I was standing outside the Mesa Parking structure waiting for Sang, ten minutes before the start of the make-up workshops for Common Ground auditions.

Chauncer texted me, and we started texting back and forth. Eventually, he made a corny joke, saying, “Wanna come over? I can show you something special. ;)”

His dick. I rolled my eyes and decided to play along. “What? Hahah lol.”

“You know what. LOLOL JK.”

I knew very well that, in the male dicksucker’s dictionary, “jk” meant “I wanna sit on your dick.” But I brushed it off and pretended to laugh along.

After getting back to my apartment, I chatted with Chauncer over AIM. At this point it was getting pretty late and I really had to do a write-up for the French movie I watched earlier, but Chauncer didn’t hesitate to extend one last poorly masked invitation for sex.

Chauncer:
I’m still working on my art project. Come over and help me!

bbq dinner:
I still need to do my French homework. D:

Chauncer:
Come do your homework here!

I sighed and glanced at the time. 2 AM. Did I want some? Was I that horny? Was I that bored? Was I that lonely?

One out of four questions, I answered yes, but it was the only question that ever mattered.



After finishing our Pho and dropping Angela off back at her place, the rest of us four guys headed back to the apartments. While walking back inside from the parking lot, I offered some helpful girlfriend advice: “It’s usually the upper half that’s the best. Concentrate there. Upper half, bottom side. Make sure she knows in advance to stay away from your piss slit once you’ve jizzed.”

“Aiight thanks Brian!”

Once we settled inside, we watched Daniel play Devil May Cry 3 and fashioned an apple bong so that some of us could go to space (not me).

In our conversations about girls, sex, and guys, basically things that all guys wanted, everyone would love to bring up my poor choices in the past. Tonight, we brought up—

“Chauncer Hien.” I said.

Alex looked up at me confused. “Who?”

“You know, Chauncer. French Homework!”

“Oh WAIT! CHAUNCER IS FRENCH HOMEWORK?”

“Wait, you didn’t know that?”

“No, you guys always referred to him as French Homework and I figured it was better that I didn’t know who it was. OH MY GOD YOU SLEPT WITH CHAUNCER HIEN.”



“You slept with Chauncer Hien last night. Wow.” Kevin sat back trying to get the images out of his head, and Alfonso was too busy laughing. I continued eating my steak. We were at the dining commons.

“Yeah, kinda literally,” I said. I was too eager to spill all the fun details. “I think at one point I fell asleep on top of him. My dick was pretty limp the whole night. Seriously, it was 5 AM. I had spent the last two hours writing up a French essay, putting it through an English-to-French translator and correcting the French.”

“Haha well damn Brian. Even at 5 AM in the morning, you can get sex any time whenever you want. I’m envious of you.”

I smiled, nodded, and worked on cutting my steak. This was too much of a fun dinner, so I didn’t wanna bring myself down by saying something that I really wanted to say: Don’t be.

Slave to the Machine

110 pounds.

I had to work out and gain weight. That was it. That was what I needed, what I needed in order to flush out all these images in my head. I told myself, the only reason those images were in my head, and the only reason I liked to look at the same images on the Internet, were that, being a skinny boy, I admired their bodies. Their pecs, their abs, their arms, their cocks, their cocks in other guys’ mouths, their cocks in other guys’ asses. Yes, if I worked out and got buff, I wouldn’t envy these men and their bodies anymore, and thus these images would never cross my mind again.

Just a few months ago before the start of eighth grade, my dad had bought me the Weider 8515, a home workout machine, and he told me that he didn’t want me to be skinny forever and that it was time to become a real man. I never thought anything serious of what he said until now.

Time to become a real man. I wanted to at least break 120 pounds.

I worked out pretty hard for a while. I followed the instruction manual’s workout plan for bulking up, doing each different exercise in three to five sets of eight to twelve reps each and taking two minute breaks in between each set. I used every part of the machine that was readily available: the lat bar for my lats, the butterfly bars and the imitation bench press for my chest, and the leg thingy for my legs.

At one point I thought it worked.

I went at least two months without jacking off and without looking at those images again.

Mission accomplished; it was time to celebrate by jacking off. To lesbian porno.

My earphones on and the volume of queefs on full blast, I sat back to squish around my limp dick for about fifteen minutes.

Ok, this was getting boring, so I tried to rationalize with myself: Today, I need to slowly ease myself into lesbian porno. I’ll start myself with five minutes of gay porno to get me hard and close, and just when I’m almost ready to shoot, I’ll switch back to the slutty girl on girl action.

I followed through with the plan. I watched two guys getting it on in an exotic rainforest and finished by watching ten seconds of a chick sit on another chick’s face. I figured, tomorrow, I’ll only look at gay porno until I’m halfway ready to shoot.

I ended up watching guys getting their faces sprayed with gallons of jizz for twenty straight minutes, from flaccid to climax. Shit.



153 pounds.

I officially peaked. The last four weeks of winter quarter 2010, I shot up from like 138 pounds to 150 pounds easily. Now, it was my sixth week into spring quarter, and I had been fluctuating from 150 to 155 pounds. 160, I need to fucking break 160.

I had been getting a lot of compliments, however. At the gym, I ran into my friend Ryan, a friend who I occasionally worked out with last year. “Damn Brian, your chest and your arms—you look so much bigger now!” He squeezed my bicep.

Alfonso and Khoa, upon seeing me in a tank, would say something like, “Oh shit, look at this buff man. You look so much bigger now.” “Now that’s the kind of chest I want,” Khoa would say.

This past week I ran into my dorm roommate Julian from last year, and he told me that I was looking hella “yoked” now. I wasn’t too sure what yoked meant, but I knew it didn’t mean “like a hella good dancer,” so I figured he thought I looked so much bigger now. The same day I also ran into a friend of Julian, who also grabbed at my pec a little and complimented it, saying, “You look so much bigger now. How do you get a chest like that?”

I felt like I had never gotten so many compliments about anything before.

I found myself at the gym again on Tuesday evening, lifting weights. Up, down, up, down, up, down. I was only going into my second set of bench presses when I realized, This is kinda boring. I finished off the set, and as I lied back down to get ready for my third, I thought to myself again, Why am I about spending one and a half hours at the gym again tonight? On my fourth set, This isn’t making me happy. On my fifth set, Didn’t I have other plans tonight? I realized that I had actually planned on taking a dance class at Boogiezone that night. For once I had extra money to spare, and since the beginning of the quarter I had only taken one other workshop class. That was extremely little compared to the twelve I took within the first two weeks of fall quarter. I really missed dancing.

Yet somehow, I found myself doing incline presses. Up, down, up, down, up, down, I pulled the barbell. And then it was too late to head over to Boogiezone. But wait! At 8:30, there was going to be hip hop class at the gym in one of the dance rooms, and I could’ve snuck in for free!

All I had to do was go upstairs.

But no. Dancing burned calories, calories that I couldn’t afford to burn because I needed to gain the seven pounds that I still needed. I decided that I would rather stay down here, to enslave myself to the rote, repetitive tasks of lifting—up down up down up down—and of pumping iron. Up, down, up, down.



112 pounds.

I studied myself in the mirror, shirtless. I tried to look at myself from different angles, bent my arms in different ways, tried to squeeze my pecs together. I realized I made no improvement. After two months I barely gained any muscle. I was still a stick, a fucking stick. How much weight did I gain? Like two pounds? I was weak.

It was time to get back to that damn Weider 8515.

Never Alone

Trung Nguyen:
hold on sorry ,my motor skilsl suck when im wasted
hold on brb i need to chane [change] this might take a whiel

It was only week 2 of spring quarter, so Trung was getting as fucked up as he could before the workload got heavy. I rolled my eyes and checked the time. It was 3:45 AM, on a Thursday night. I really needed to see someone right away, but who in my apartment building could I go to? Alfonso, one story above me on the other side of the apartment, is probably back from the club, but he is most likely drunk. Alex, my next door neighbor, is still probably hanging out with Kaba Modern. Maybe Khoa’s around and sober! He likes to go clubbing, but maybe he didn’t go out tonight.

I put my sweater and headed downstairs to the first floor. Tonight was a pleasant night, surprisingly calm and quiet for a Thursday night, the usual party night. It already felt a little better to be out of my apartment and to be outside breathing the crisp cool air.

I arrived at Khoa’s doorstep and went ahead with opening the door (we don’t keep our doors locked). I glanced past the bathroom to the left, only to meet the surprised stares of a rather red-faced Alfonso and a rather red-faced Khoa. They had been huddling around Khoa’s computer checking out some girl on Facebook.

“What tha gay!” Khoa said.

“What’s this gay doing here?” Alfonso walked toward me with his arms open. A hug from Alfonso? I went in for it.

“Ah!” He pushed back. “I’m not that drunk!”

“You know you want it Alfonso!” Khoa said.

“Yeah...” Alfonso and I hugged.

“So how’ve ya been?” he asked. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.” Like since last week. “Did you give up choreo? Please don’t tell me you gave up on choreo.”

“Nah, I haven’t. I signed up for the Team Millennia summer intensives remember?”

“K, good. Phew.” He sighed. “I haven’t given up either.”

“How was the Kaba Modern club party?”

“Ah dude, that shit was fucking awesome. You shoulda went. I danced with some some Kaba girls, and I even met Lawrence.”

“Lawrence Kao?”

“Yeah, I met Lawrence Kao. I was like, ‘Dude, you’re my hero. You inspire me.’ And he was all like, ‘Nah dude! YOU inspire ME!’ And I was like, ‘Whaaaa?’ And then he was all, ‘I’m just like you. I started dancing when I was in college too.’ And I then I somehow scheduled lunch with Yosuke tomorrow!”

“Wow. Lunch?”

“Yeah! I don’t know!”

“Have a fun lunch date tomorrow.”

“Nah dude it’s not like that! But how are you and your boyfriend? You still going out with that fool?”

Alfonso and Khoa were too drunk and having too much fun right now; I didn’t wanna bring down their spirits, so I lied. “Yeah, of course.”

I chilled with them for fifteen minutes, and all we did was joke around. It was good. It got my mind off the last few hours, but I still needed to have some real talk. I was stuck with my original option: talk to Trung, the drunk ex, about my most recent breakup.



Breakthrough’s second Super Saturday happened to fall over the Valentine’s Day weekend (on Saturday, as the name would suggest) at Bellarmine College Prep. I drove back up to NorCal Friday night and picked my boyfriend (at the time) up at the train station. He was going to stay in San Jose with me for the whole weekend, but there was the whole problem with what’d he do from 9 till 3 during Super Saturday.

“Alright, so I guess after you go walk around a bit and check out the Rose Garden, you can come back and clean out my car.” I tossed him the keys. It was sunny, breezy Saturday morning. A good day for a walk. “And when you finish cleaning my car, you can read the books I put in the backseat. I picked out some Aristotle for you. Alright, I’ll see you in six hours. Have fun.”

We hugged, and after double checking to make sure that there were no kids around, we shared a brief kiss. I watched him walk off into I- don’t- really- know- where- because- I- was- totally- unfamiliar- with- the- area- I- had- just- sent- him- off- into- for- six- hours. He looked too cute wearing my beanie (...which Trung got for me for Christmas) and his cardigan.

Once he was out of sight, I headed on campus and found Lan, one of the teachers from the past summer.

“Brian! Oh goodness, it’s so good to see you! Where’s Trung?”

“We rode separately. He’s not here yet? But I’m usually the late one.”

We shrugged it off. For the next half hour or so, we helped setting up before the kids arrived. Eventually, Trung showed up. He had overslept.

“Hey Brian,” he said, “When I was driving over here, I saw someone walking on the street and he looked like your boyfriend. I think so anyway. I’ve only seen him through pictures.”

“Yeah, that was probably him. He’s going to be pretty much walking and exploring the area for the next six hours.”

“Really? What’s there to explore around here?”

“I don’t really know.”

“Y’know, you should ask Jessica if he can come visit for the day!” Trung suggested.

“What?”

“He can be like the other volunteers.”

“No way, this isn’t going to fly by Jessica, and you just wanna meet him so you can like, sabotage us or tell him embarrassing stories about me.”

“No, I promise I won’t! But seriously Brian, you’re really going to let him wander around for six hours?”

“He’s also going to clean my car.”

“Com’n. Just do it. The worst that can happen is that Jessica says no, but she won’t. It’s Valentine’s Day weekend.”

Valentine’s Day weekend. I only got to see my boyfriend once every three or four weeks, and I had to make the most of the time we had together. I finally gave in to Trung’s nagging and asked Jessica, telling her that I had a friend who was very interested in teaching at Breakthrough next summer and wanted to get an idea of what the students were like. To my surprise, she agreed.

The first workshop of the day was already starting, so it was too late to go get my boyfriend. After an hour, I was free to go get him. I found him inside my car, which was now clutter-free, and I brought him on campus. The first person he met was—

“HI I’M TRUNG!”

“Ranier.”

“Nice to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you!”

Ranier looked back at me. I shrugged.

“So Rain-ner-eee-er,” Trung’s eyes darted back and forth to check for any students, “Do you like to drink and party?”

“Nah.”

“Aw, you’re no fun like Brian.”



Drunk Trung and I talked for about half an hour before I went to bed. After telling him all about the breakup, he was able to sum it up with one pretty simple sentence: “So you just exploded and you hella burnt the bridge. You not only burnt it, but you pissed on the ashes.” Sounded about right.

Not to Dance

Today, I was supposed to audition for another dance team, but last night I decided not to instead.

The team was Paradime, a collegiate crew based half an hour away at CSU Fullerton. Alfonso, Kevin, and another two of our friends Jamie and Angela checked out the audition workshops last week. They all decided that they wouldn’t audition after the second day of workshops, but I was still wavering. I liked the audition pieces, but I didn’t really “feel” the people themselves.

Yesterday, the day before auditions, I finally decided that I wouldn’t audition. I hadn’t thought the family aspect would be as important to me as the dancing in a dance team, but, I gradually realized it was. Without (publicly) passing judgment on the team itself, I’ll just say that I couldn’t picture myself in the Paradime family. I explained this to Alfonso and he accepted, saying, “If you’re not feeling it then it was never meant to be.”

In other dance-related news, it looks like I’m actually going to have to cut back on taking dance classes because of money. I had told myself that I could sacrifice shoes, clothes, and chocolates but that dance would be the ONE thing that would remain unaffected, but, with the start of a new quarter coming up, I need a replacement parking permit, $225. I plan on paying for it myself, and I have $250 in my account.

I’m going to need the remaining $15 and my last paycheck from Pippin to support myself until I get a refill on cash from my relatives for Christmas, and honestly, the hours at the Education Academy aren’t too great right now. My shifts so far are either one or two hours long each; I hope my manager’s just giving me a little at a time to ease me in.

Well, I hear picking up choreo from watching youtube videos is a helpful skill. Time to work on that.

One other thing I need to worry about once I buy my parking permit is what I’m going to tell my mom. My account is connected to hers so she’ll be able to see the $225 missing from it. If I tell her that I used it to buy my parking permit, I won’t be able to convince her to not pay me back with the money she scavenges in coins from water fountains. Maybe I’ll just learn hella dope choreo pieces on YouTube and show her and tell her I spent $225 on a week of endless dance workshops. She’ll talk shit about me with my dad when I’m in bed, but whatever, she’ll be $225 richer in the sense that she will not have lost $225 by her maternal instincts.

---
“For My Parents”
Written March 16th, 2007 (Excerpted)

I remember a year ago when I was going through my gay teenage angst rebellion phase, I didn’t give two shits about my mom or dad. [I wrote on the night of 3/28/06,] “I think if I still had any respect left for them as my parents, I would've been quick to apologize. But sadly, I hardly even care anymore.”

That [same] night, my brother came into my room to lecture me again, basically telling me, “Look, I used to be where you are now. But one day, you’ll realize how important it is to you that you make them as happy as possible. I know that you get annoyed when I play along with mom and dad’s corny humor—I think it’s dumb too, but I do it for a reason. So, just go downstairs and apologize to Mom already, whether or not it hurts you.”

I called his policy absolutely bullshit and retorted with some shit like, “Fuck no. If they can’t make me happy, how can I even begin to reciprocate?”

God, did I really mention that when I look back at sophomore year, I really hated every thing about me? Well, fortunately, within one year, I’ve gone a long way, along with my parents.

My original plans didn’t happen today, so I wounded up dining out in Milpitas with my family and relatives. Normally, I would skip out on these kinds of dinners and just go to Oakridge, but it was my mom’s 50th birthday today, so I figured that I should be nice for once. I’ve learned from the past year that even though me and my parents hardly ever interact together during family gatherings, my presence is still important to them.

Towards the end of the dinner, I stood up to stretch, and my little cousins asked me to flex my muscles again. I heeded, and this ended up catching the attention of all my relatives at the dinner table. Vy, Hannah’s mom, singled me out.

“Wow, Brian, do you work out?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I answered timidly with a bit of pride just beginning to sprout out of its seedpod (yeah, I’m a lot more modest around my relatives than I am around my friends).

“Do you have a girlfriend?” she inquired.

Upon hearing that question, I tensed a little bit, so I looked at my parents for any kind of visual cues. They were leaning over their plates and staring down, forcing themselves to keep up their smiles.

I let out a deep breath and then regained my posture. “Nah, I don’t.”

“Oh, no, why?”

“Oh, well, I just keep on rejecting them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, rejection after rejection, they finally figured out the real me, so they stopped trying altogether.” I smirked. At this point, I was actually kinda amusing myself by seeing how long I could dance along the crater of the volcano.

“Oh, is it your mom? Does she say ‘No girlfriends’?”

“Nah, trust me, she doesn’t say ‘No girlfriends’.” With a quirky smile, I sat down, and as I prodded the grains of rice on my plate with my spoon, my grin relented back to a timid smile.

I glanced over my parents, and they were sitting back in their chairs, breathing a small sigh of relief.

Whenever you guys are ready.

Retrogradation

I was wrong about Pippin; yesterday evening, I actually had to take some initiative and use some intense and quick thinking skills at the face of a challenge, and the reward was satisfying.

I noticed that the ice cream bar had been out of chocolate chip ice cream for a while, and patrons were getting quite antsy. My duty for the night was only to wipe down tables, but the ice cream busser wasn’t anywhere around. I decided, screw cleaning tables for now—it’s time to take some initiative. I rushed to the kitchen and into the freezer to search for the replacement ice cream.

There were layers of buckets of ice cream stacked on top of more layers, and after looking through the ones on the top layer, I figured, shit, the chocolate chip ice cream must be somewhere on the bottom. I had already spent two minutes in the freezer and I was fucking cold, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to live with myself without knowing that I did everything I could to find that chocolate chip ice cream.

After another three minutes, I had looked through all the ice cream buckets I could find. My fingers were numb from lifting so many and I started to shiver violently. Five minutes was far too long for anyone to spend inside a freezer, so I had to get out quick. But god damn it, NOT without that chocolate chip ice cream. What do I do?

I did the next best thing. I remembered stumbling upon a bucket of mint chocolate chip ice cream early on in my search, so I dug through the buckets again to retrieve it. I figured this was close enough.

My hard work paid off, because I think the patrons enjoyed the mint chocolate chip more than any of the other three ice cream flavors at the bar. Within five minutes, I could look anywhere around the dining room and spot two or three people holding cones with globes of bright glowing green stacked on top. I felt satisfied.

Too bad the glee only last for another three minutes. The ice cream busser, who was a superior because he was one of the full-time working adults, passed by the ice cream bar and noticed the alien green ice cream. I watched the patrons waiting in line gape at him in horror as he hauled it away.

K, fine, whatever, I thought. As long as he actually brought back normal chocolate chip ice cream, it wouldn’t be so bad.

He came back with a new bucket of ice cream within a minute. There was no fucking way he could’ve found it. Once he set it up at the ice cream bar and left, I swung by to check it.

It was cookies ‘n’ cream ice cream. That fucking bastard; at least I was closer. He didn’t even replace the label on top of the ice cream bar. It still said “Chocolate Chip.” Just because cookies and cream was also whitish and blackish/brown, did he think it would work the same as chocolate chip ice cream? Or maybe the colors were the only way he could identify it because he couldn’t match the complicated squiggly lines (a. k. a. LETTERS) on the bucket with the ones on the ice cream bar label. (There’s a really racist comment that I can say if I continue ranting, but I’ll stop.)

I ducked down behind the ice cream bar to dig up the label for “Cookies ‘n’ Cream” and replaced it with the “Chocolate Chip” one, and I returned to my normal cleaning duties, where I brooded about how much Pippin sucked.

The night finished off even better when Head Chef, who I guess is also one of the managers, approached me to reprimand me for not doing my job, again. Last Thursday when I worked, I admit that I took two ten-minute unsanctioned breaks within one hour to chill with Alfonso, Kevin, and Erica, who were eating upstairs where I didn’t think any other workers would spot me. But apparently, one did and ratted me out to Head Chef, and he warned me that that would be the last time I socialized with my friends during work.

During yesterday’s shift, I sat down to eat with Kevin, Alfonso, and Asian John again, but this time I was actually on my legitimate fifteen-minute break. I finished at 7:10, and the three of them left to go to the ARC for a dance class, so I didn’t even have anyone else to socialize with for the last forty minutes. But, apparently, some time during those forty minutes, Head Chef could swear that I was fucking around.

Closing was a little different that night at Pippin because we had the help of a bunch of Middle Earth staff members, who were hosting a Casino Night event at Pippin for all the residents. They were folding up and putting away all the tables, something we normally wouldn’t do for closing, and the tables had to be wiped down before they were put away. I knew I was one of the people wiping down the tables, but unbeknownst to me, I guess all the responsibility for the tables fell solely on me. And apparently, Head Chef saw some dirty unwiped tables already folded up.

I did see to it that all the tables under my watch were wiped down before they were put away, but it was fucking impossible for me to personally check and approve every table, for two reasons: First, on normal closing nights where patrons, feeling like leaving whenever they wanted to, left in succession, I only had to deal with one or two tables at a time. But yesterday night, the Middle Earth staff members were rushing multiple tables of people to finish quickly and to leave at once, leaving me with up to like ten tables to clean at the same time. There were too many tables and too many Middle Earth staff members who cared only about putting them away, and the other cleaners and I were few in number. And second, the fucking ice cream busser wasn’t doing his damn job again and people at the ice cream bar were getting impatient, so I found myself making two trips back into the freezer to retrieve ice cream replacements. Those were the only times I wasn’t present in the dining hall from 7:10 to 8 PM.

I tried to reason with Head Chef, but his stubborn ass boiled the argument down to nothing more than squabbling by repeating over and over again, “No, you didn’t, you weren’t doing your job.” He refused to show me evidence of the dirty tables or to acknowledge anything I said. After the fourth or fifth time repeating that, he absent-mindedly wandered somewhere else, leaving me there mid-sentence. Brooding silently in frustration, I stood there and watched his fat ass leave the kitchen

I am not getting fired.

---
“I rock.”
Written September 7th, 2007

I was running about thirty minutes late to work yesterday, although it wasn’t because I had terrible work ethic. It’s actually expected and accepted that I could possibly show up any time between 6 and 6:40 because Ben knows that my SJCC class gets out at 5:45, sometimes later, and that traffic going down 280-south/87-south during that time is a huge bitch. So there’s no really problem except for the fact that I start to beat myself when my tardiness starts pushing twenty minutes.

I veered into the shopping plaza’s parking lot and parked a few stores down as my car clock hit 6:30. I still had to change into my business casual work clothing in the little space of my car’s backseat, and that took another additional five minutes that I didn’t really want to waste. Once I got my nice shoes on, I ran over to SCORE! and threw the door open, panting and looking hardly professional at all.

About 7 kids were there, and Ben was working with them. Juju, one of my favorites who’s probably like a forth grader, looked up from her computer at me and randomly laughed, “Brian, you rock.” ITG2 machines have informed me that I “rock” about 2303 times (stats.xml) for the last two years, but hearing “You Rock” from Juju was a hell lot better, almost touching. I felt better for the rest of the day.

The Key to Happiness

(Continued from the last entry, “Happiness”)

My family and I, we always stayed at Harrah’s. The first thing my brother and I would do once we got into our hotel room was run to the window to see what kind of view we had. For some reason, it really mattered to us. If we got the pool, then it was going to be the best weekend ever. If we got the dirty rooftop of some building, then the weekend was still going to be okay because all that was only a small embellishment to the magnificent scene before us: Reno at night and its colorful bright lights lit up all across the city.

Even though my parents always booked non-smoking rooms, I could still smell a slight hint of smoke. Back then, I didn’t know it was cigarette smoke; I just thought of it as that nice hotel smell. And that nice hotel smell was everywhere. At the restaurants, at the casinos, and with all four of us as we ate, slept, and strolled outside. (Smell always evokes emotion and memories, and to this day, when I smell cigarette smoke, I’ll further take huge whiffs and miss my family and the times we spent together. This is probably why I’ll die of second-hand-smoke-induced lung explosions.)

The first task on the agenda after settling and resting was dinner. On the first night, we always went to this one restaurant—I don’t remember the name, but it had green walls, and we always went to it for breakfast for the following two days. While waiting for service, my brother and I grabbed the Keno cards and the accompanying crayons and “played” along with my parents. I’d mark some random amount of numbers and then watch the Keno screens, fervently praying that my numbers would get drawn. I never had luck unless I filled in at least eighty percent of the numbers, and I didn’t understand why my parents didn’t just do that either.

Once the waitress came, I always ordered the same thing: Scrambled eggs and hash browns with wheat toast. I once decided to be adventurous and ordered poached eggs, having no idea what “poached” was. The result of my experiment was disgustingly disappointing, so I never ventured again.

What happened after eating wasn’t always the same. Sometimes, after breakfast, we’d walk through the casinos and head straight outside. My dad carried this big bulky camera around and took pictures of my brother, mom, and me next to statues. I think our destination was usually Circus Circus or some other hotel. Sometimes for lunch, we’d always stop by this one hotel (might’ve been Harrahs) that had a McDonald’s that served Pizza Hut, which I found to be the most baffling concept ever, but nonetheless I always got the personal pan pepperoni pizza. For lunch and dinner, we’d usually find a buffet and enjoy ourselves there. Even in my younger years, I pigged out and pooped it all away immediately afterward.

Among all the sightseeing and eating, one huge part of the trip (most of the trip) was dedicated to my parents’ gambling adventures at the Harrah’s casinos. My parents would drop my brother and me off at the hotel arcade (“Starcade!”) with a crisp twenty dollar bill while they tried their luck at the casinos. The arcade had purple walls, but that’s beside the point. The arcade had a corner stocked with some of the most amazing useless toys that my brother and I had ever seen. From bicycle reflectors to huge flashing disco balls, we wanted it all. Stomp the moles, whack the alligators, roll the balls up the slope, shoot the coin into that very very tiny jackpot slot. As a young, naïve child, this was my favorite part of the trip.

I don’t think my parents ever won big from the casinos. Every once in a while, they’d at least make back what they lost and occasionally a little more. On arcade visits where I would finally get a prize that I was saving up for (such as Op), I’d hope that when my brother and I reunited with my parents to eat, they would greet us with the same happiness that I felt. But they were usually just okay, and so I’d feel just okay too.

I admit, the biggest part of the trip was the least family-oriented part. Sometimes I would wonder why my parents gambled if they never won a lot. I figured that we were already rich enough because our two-story house was far nicer than a lot of others. Reflecting further upon it, I think the Reno trip was mostly about the gambling and not so much about being together, but I still cherish the family time we had and the whole experience overall. Besides, we were essentially all doing the same thing. My mom, dad, brother, and I gambled our money in hopes of coming home Sunday night being worth a lot more than we were the Friday afternoon we left, and if our hopes went unfulfilled, we could at least lament together in the four-hour ride back home.



While waiting for my mom to pick up her phone, I thought about the email again. After her little overdramatic part about having a heart attack, she went on to write about how shitty our money situation’s been. I had always known it was shitty, but the details she reviewed to me were an absolute shock: My parents had borrowed a total of six thousand dollars from our relatives to sustain ourselves for the last three months, and they already secured another two thousand to get through the next month. Unfortunately, that’s still not enough, so my mom is going to try to sell her car (does anyone want a Corolla? I swear I haven’t had sex in this one.), and now my brother has to pay for his own bills (insurance, student loans, etc.).

My mom wrote me, “Please tell me if I have done something wrong? Is it because of the monies that I said in my previous email to you?” I didn’t really understand what she meant. The email she sent me before reminded me to deliver those fucking persimmons, and the only mention about money was I’d get $100 if I did it. Maybe my mom thought that I thought that she thought that I was a terrible greedy money-motivated son and that I got butt-hurt? Either way, I didn’t realize how much money was such a sensitive topic in my family. Maybe it’s a sensitive topic in everyone’s families? She did, after all, hide the details about our money-borrowing for the last three months.

Of course, I didn’t really review all that in my head while waiting for my mom to pick up, because the phone actually rang only once before she answered. Gently breathing in the smell of cigarette smoke as I passed the student center and trying my best to ignore how upset she sounded, I carried the normal routine phone conversation: “I’m fine (lie). Classes are going well (lie). Work’s been good (lie). I haven’t spent more money on shoes. I’ve been having three meals a day (lie).”

And then we got to the awkward part, with her asking me if there was something that I had been upset about. I told us that I was perfectly fine (lie), that Trung and I were still going strong (lie), and that I wasn’t mad at her and my dad for the “monies” or for any reason. Then she reassured me that I could always go to her if something was wrong, and I told her of course I would (lie). I finally got to the “K love you bye” part and hung up after continuously trying to convince her that I had just been too too too busy to call, and I think she believed me, which she should’ve because that was one of the only few things that I didn’t lie about.

Although, upon further reflection—actually, no reflection or deep thinking is even necessary—I know that “being too busy” may not be a lie, but it’s still a really really bad excuse. It’s impossible to not take five minutes out of my day for a simple phone call. There’s so much down time when I wait at the bus stop or walk to class or check Facebook during the day.

I just can’t bring myself to do it. When I’m here at Irvine, I have freedom; I forget that I have two parents and a brother. And I don’t like to be reminded that I do, because this reminder also reminds me that I have obligations to my family. And it’s no longer just any family now; it’s a family with money problems, even worse.

I’m the last child in college, not to mention a college that will probably boost its tuition fees by thirty percent next year. As though it isn’t bad enough being the family disappointment, I explained to Alfonso at dinner, I am now the family burden, which also has its close ties with being the family disappointment. I know I shouldn’t, but I wonder if my parents, particularly my dad, think to themselves, We’re throwing away money by putting through college this gay teacher/moneyless-future-career-bound kid who wastes all his time dancing like the fag he is.

Going under the assumption that they do think this as they cry themselves to sleep every night (don’t try to convince me otherwise, because I usually make something good come out of being hard on myself), I need to start supporting myself. I need to take responsibility. Step up the work hours, stop spending money on material objects, stay away from the baking aisle at Albertsons.

All easier written than done, however.

I fucking hate working at Pippin. If I have to scrub dirty tables in silence for more than a total of eight hours a week, I will shoot myself. And even if I do (work more than eight hours, not shoot myself), I want rewards—rewards that I can wear on my feet, rewards that I can ride around campus, rewards that I can look hot with. If my paychecks go straight to paying rent or tuition or whatever bills, I’ll feel like I’m not even getting paid. I know that I’m getting paid and I know that my money is going into something useful, but I just can’t feel it if I don’t get to satisfy my selfish needs. Yes, selfish; I know I’m being selfish and it’s fucking hard to suck it up.

Don’t worry though, I’ll learn. I’ll suck it up. I’ll convince myself that I can live without new dunks, a longboard, and a tattoo to show for my hard work (lol) at the dining commons, and I’ll also convince myself that bussing people’s dishes, which, by the way, they’re supposed to bus themselves those fuckers, is in a way like teaching a student how to write a five-paragraph response-to-literature essay.

This is all for my parents. I owe it to them. I love them, and I can’t just live my own carefree life three hundred miles away from them as their money problems kill them slowly.

Never have I disagreed so vehemently with that stupid cliché, “Money doesn’t buy happiness!!”

Happiness

Some of my most distinct childhood memories are my family trips to Reno, Nevada. I don’t know why, but all throughout my life up until the third grade, we (my mom, dad, brother, and me) went a lot, and it’d just be totally random. Sometimes it was a holiday, sometimes it was during a school break, but most of the time, it was coming home from school on Friday to my mom telling me, “Get ready, we’re going to Reno. We’ll be back Sunday.” By 3 or 4, we’d be out of the house.

The four-hour ride seemed like the longest wait in the world to me at the time. My dad drove this beige BMW that he had before he and my mom got married in ’85, and it had the stiffest and most uncomfortable leather seats. I wished I could’ve slept throughout the entire ride but any time my dad tried to accelerate or drive past seventy miles per hour, the engine roared like a motherfuck. Looking back though, it was good that I didn’t get to sleep the whole time, because it was family time.

My dad drove, my brother got the passenger seat, and my mom and I sat in the back on the right and left, respectively. (To this day, the formation has never changed on our family outings to restaurants or our relatives’ places.) My mom talked the most, either offering the rest of us fruits or bottled water or yelling at my dad for driving too fast (75 MPH). The car smelled like citrus whenever my mom peeled oranges for us.

We all talked about school, and, I think I lied a lot. During one trip when I was a first grader, my mom recounted some story she heard in the news, and I told her—what a coincidence—that during recess, my friends found the same story in a newspaper on the blacktop and asked me to read it to them. (In reality, however, I wouldn’t learn how to read for another year, and second, I didn’t have any friends.)

After the first few trips, we knew to keep an eye out for certain landmarks that told us how much farther we had to go. Early on in the trip, I’d look up at the bright sunny sky and see balls of a bunch of different colors, suspended in the air by power lines that followed us through the mountains. In the middle of the trip, we’d drive next to mountainsides that were blanketed by nets, and I’d look up the mountainside toward the cloudy gray sky and unsuccessfully try to find the nets’ edges. I had no idea what they were for, so my dad told me that they kept the mountainsides from crumbling and causing landslides. Toward the end of the trip, with Reno only ten minutes away and the sun far away behind us, there were the billboards. (“I keep looking for a bunch of big signs with avertizements on them because that tells me that I’m close to Reno!”)

At this point, the highway was one long straight narrow road that seemed not to end at the horizon, but rather, as we continued to drive forward, it emanated from the horizon, as did an orange hue that seeped through the sky, the long wispy streaks of pink cotton candy clouds, the gray silhouettes of distant mountains, and the succession of billboards*. The billboards came one after another, and I never realized how big they were until we passed by each one. They projected vibrant four-star meals or luxurious suites suited only for giants, and—the more fascinating billboards—they branded bare human sensuality as dazzling entertainment, though to me the parade of billboards was a show itself.

If we somehow happened to be asleep, this was the part my dad would wake us up for, and we’d all cheer and applaud. With skyscraping hotels in sight, we knew we had made it and we were finally here, here at Reno at last.



For the entire week and a half since I had been back from NorCal, I didn’t call my parents. My mom tried calling me a few times, and then my dad tried. I always found myself in an inconvenient time or place to pick up, such as my apartment, where sometimes I would have just have enough reception so that I’d get an incoming call, but so little that the call would immediately drop if I picked up. I kept on telling myself to call them when there was time, but somehow, I would always forget and get distracted with some form of dancing or schoolwork or internet social networking.

I figured that they only wanted to remind me to deliver those fucking persimmons, so I did last Tuesday, hoping that my aunt would call them for me and appease their nerves. I still planned on calling them, but I was hoping that the delivery would buy me some more time in case other “obligations” got in the way. That plan kinda failed. I got this email from my mom the following day:

Hi Brian, I hope every thing is OK with you. I'm getting worried about you because you have not picked up your phone or returned our calls. Why? Did I do or say something to make you upset/mad? We need to talk. Please tell me if I have done something wrong? Is it because of the monies that I said in my previous email to you? I can't get a hold on you and I get so stressed out. I'm developping some kind of anxiety and I think my heart is beating too fast I think I will have a heart attack soon ...

I didn’t know how to feel. My mom’s been overdramatic in the past, so the heart attack bit didn’t make me too worried. There was no doubt though that I couldn’t put off calling her anymore, but I also had to get on campus and go meet up with Alfonso for dinner. So, I figured instead of listening to music while waiting for the bus, I could actually call my mom instead that day.

Once I was outside and sitting down at the bus stop, I dialed her number, and as the phone rang I ran through the things I’d say to her in my head. Hi mom. I’m fine. Sorry I haven’t been calling. I’ve been busy. I delivered the persimmons. I got pizza and one hundred dollars. I’ll cook cơm gà on Friday. K love you bye.

The ringing stopped, and shortly after, I heard a quiet, feeble, “Hello? Brian?”

I stuttered. “Uh, hello, hi?” Liked I was talking to some stranger. “Hey I can’t really hear you right now because I’m outside waiting for the bus and the traffic is really really loud so I’ll call you back in ten minutes is that ok? K love you bye.” I hung up quickly without letting my mom say another word.

I was lying, of course. It wasn’t the traffic that was loud; it was my mom who was too quiet. I had never heard her voice sound so soft and weak, almost crackly like an old, tired out lady. It caught me so off guard that I suddenly felt at a loss for words.

When I got onto campus, I had my phone in hand, ready to call her again, but I stalled. I walked across campus for about ten minutes playing with the phone in my hand. Sliding my phone open and closed, checking the time every thirty seconds, opening up the calendar to make sure that it was still Wednesday, double/triple/quadruple-checking my last text from Alfonso to make sure he said to eat at Mesa, not Pippin.

After highlighting my mom’s name in my phone book, exiting out, and then going back to it several times, I somehow, like quickly ripping off a band aid, hit the call button.



I sent my mom a link to a photobucket account where I uploaded last night the pictures of my cơm gà and salmon dinners and, tonight, pictures of me eating at a Korean barbeque place with my friends. I told her that she should share the pictures with my father and brother.

I feel like I had been gone too long. I feel like it’s because of me that we can’t really be a tight family anymore, but fuck, believe me when I say I’m trying to make shit better.

(*The picture at the beginning is in fact a picture of going down the highway 80 and getting close to Reno. You can see the pretty sky I described and a billboard on the side. I wish I had a better picture though, because I got this one after spending about thirty minutes on Googlemap’s street view trying to find the right shot.)

Cơm Gà

I cooked dinner, as I said I would a few entries ago (except I cooked Friday, not Wednesday). Chicken and chicken rice; it was pretty good, and the best part was no one got salmonella.

Back at home, my mom cooked chicken, congee, and chicken rice every two weeks, and I thought it was one of her best dishes. Well, the chicken and congee were okay, nothing super special, but it was the chicken rice that was really fucking amazing. She prepped the rice by cooking it a little in some vegetable oil and garlic, and then she’d pour it into the rice cooker and, instead of using water, she’d add the broth that came from the pot that the chicken was boiling in. Simple, but delicious. I’d eat several bowls of chicken rice for dinner and then eat it with eggs the next day for breakfast, and I’d gulp it down so quickly that I’d start choking.

For the longest time, I had been craving my mom’s chicken rice. I called her for the recipe the first week of school, partially because I wanted the recipe, but also because I hoped that showing interesting in cooking it would make her happy (in preparation for the request that I had next on my agenda: Asking for $300 for books). And it did.

She emailed me the recipe, and I was on the verge of cooking it, but then, auditions came. Common Ground, CADC, and then MCIA. During those four weeks of intense dancing, my mom would call me and always ask, “Did you make cơm gà yet?” I’d tell her no and that I had been busy, and she’d always sound disappointed. Especially by the third week, my mom no longer really believed the “I’ve been busy” excuse and probably thought I was never going to make it. By the fourth week of auditions, she stopped asking. Really though, I was pretty damn busy.

Cooking again was one of the main things I was looking forward to after all auditions. Friday night around 9, I dragged Sang over to help. I had hoped that I’d finish cooking by 10:30, but I soon discovered that the chicken, which I left to defrost in the fridge over night, was still frozen solid. The microwave defroster took forty minutes. And even after that, the chicken was still pretty frozen on the inside (unless the chicken’s pancreas and other internal organs were supposed to be rock hard).

Handling the chicken itself with my bare hands was an odd new experience. Never had I ever dug my fingers inside a chicken through its ass (first time my finger’s been any kind of ass, actually). I got a kick out of defrosting its insides by filling it up with hot water, clamping its ass shut, and shaking it violently. Pressing my ear up against the chicken, I could hear the water swishing around inside, and its legs just kinda dangled in the air. Sang didn’t approve of my cooking methods and wanted to eat Cheerios for dinner instead.

Once the chicken was clean, I dropped it in a pot of boiling water and let it stew with some onions and ginger for another hour.

At several points through the night, I had visits from random dancers, one after another. First from Daniel, Shane, and Erica Lee, and then Alfonso and Kevin, and then Sam Shih.

Eventually, it was just Sang, Sam, and me. After the chicken finished boiling, they helped me prep and cook the rice since I had never made rice before in my entire 19 years of being Vietnamese. Around 12:30, two hours after my goal time, we finished.

We spent about twenty minutes eating, and then packed up everything to head to a parking garage where everyone else was dancing. Alfonso’s face lit up when he saw what I brought along. He, Kevin, and I (again) sat down on the floor to eat, and periodically we’d get up to freestyle a bit. While eating, Kevin informed me that I had been admitted into YPC (Young Papa’s Crew).

YPC was this unofficial crew that a small group of three or four friends started last year and eventually pulled Kevin, Alfonso, and all the aforementioned dancers (except for Sang) in. When it was just starting up, I remember Edge, one of the founders, going around asking people at BBA (Bboy club) to join. He approached one of my friends that I was talking to and asked him but didn’t ask me. I was just a little sad because my friend and I sucked on the same level, but, at that point, I didn’t really know Edge yet.

At the beginning of this school year, I found myself hanging out with Kevin and Alfonso plus a lot of other YPC people, and they’d always mention YPC things. But I knew it was probably taboo to bluntly ask, “Can I join?” So I waited. Patiently.

Last week, while Alfonso was drunk (and high?) Friday night at a Halloween party with several other YPC members, he nominated me for membership. And everyone approved.

I was happy to finally be in. As I sat there inhaling my rice, I danced a little bit in my head and swayed with the music. I smiled as I ate. When I was done eating, I sat back and watched everyone dance. Shane walked over and sat down next to me.

“I hear Alfonso is going to audition next week,” she began. “Are you?”

The word spread quickly. “Yeah, I am,” I answered. Of course I was. How could I let an opportunity pass? “It shouldn’t be too bad.”

“What if you get in?”

“Dancing isn’t something I’m going to stress about anymore,” I declared. “Whatever happens is supposed to happen.” That was a phrase that Alfonso liked to use a lot, especially during the wait for the CADC roster. It was like a way of saying I don’t give a fuck (but really, I do).

Shane left to go chat with Daniel. I knew I’d be getting back up in a bit too to dance, so, carefully scooping up those last four or five grains of rice in my bowl, the ones that made up such an insignificant amount that I wouldn’t have to chew, I savored the last few minutes of my break.

Through the Looking-Glass

“George Mead—all about me—he came up with the concept of self! And self is used to like, describe your personality, based on your own self-awareness and self-image...”

Damn, Sarah’s going to set the curve on this midterm.

“...we try to like, see ourselves from another person’s point of view so we don’t like, make ourselves like, look dumb. Cooley coined the phrase ‘looking-glass self’ for a self-image based on how we think other people see us...”

I glanced around the room. Posters containing overwhelming amounts of brainwashing rhetoric lined the walls top to bottom, fighting for my attention. The few that managed to catch my eye, I read silently to myself, all while scrutinizing the pictures of people that accompanied them. “I’m glad I FAILED...at suicide, because my life is so amazing right now.” But your face isn’t. “I’m straight, but NOT narrow!” Yeah, because you’re fat. “Please let my mommy marry my mommy!” Stop whining, spoiled bitch. “Can you tell which of these children have gay parents?”

“...we initiate action, which is like the subjective side of the self, and then we evaluate the action based on how other people respond to us, which is like the objective side of the self...Brian?”

“Uh, huh?” I snapped out of my daze to see Sarah and Cameron staring at me from their sofa. “I’m listening,” I reassured them.

“Do you need help understanding anything in particular?” Sarah asked, sounding ever so concerned like a teacher or mother.

It was 11 AM, still too early to me. Running on four hours of sleep, I had woken up at 9 to go to my 9:30 natural disasters class for a midterm. It wasn’t that bad at all. I finished at 10 and went to the library to study for my sociology midterm coming up at 12:30. There, sitting in the library’s comfortable chairs, I was falling asleep when I got a text from Camerom asking me to study with him and Sarah at the Lesbian/ Gay/ Bisexual/ Transgender/ Queer/ Pansexual/ Intersex Resource Center (LGBTABCDEFG RC). When I got there, I was dismayed to find that the resource center’s chairs—couches—were far more comfortable and relaxing than the library’s.

“I’m tired. I think I’ll function better after a nap. Can you wake me up in 15 minutes, Sarah?”

“Sure.” Sarah surprised me by being unusually okay with my request to slack off. If this was last year back in the dorms when we were all first year students, she’d lecture me about how I hadn’t done any of the reading for the last four weeks, and with the midterm coming up in less than two hours, I couldn’t have any time to be lazy. Maybe she had given up on me.

Oh well, Sarah granted me nap time, so I couldn’t resist taking advantage of that. As I stretched out in my couch, I noticed the big window looking out into the hallway and realized that anyone could walk by and see me sitting inside among a bunch of rainbows and gay empowerment magazines, so I pulled my cap over my face. After adjusting my wedgie, I leaned back and rested my eyes.



As a gay guy, I’m often criticized for trying too hard to put up a masculine façade. When you see me, you see a guy with a New Era 59fifty cap slapped on over some buzzed hair, a pair of black basketball shorts that matches with whatever T-shirt I’m wearing, and Nikes to complete the baller-dancer hybrid look. When I’m not dressed like your typical Irvine Asian guy, I’m in a tank at the ARC lifting weights, trying to get that nice physique—something I’d rather be doing than expressing my emotions.

I don’t want people to look at me and think, “Oh my god, with gay guys like that, why would I ever want one to raise kids?” Yes, I do try too hard, and I even get carried away sometimes. Kevin and Alfonso expressed far more emotion than I did when CADC rejected them, while I, not wanting to do anything that “the gays” would do, sat silently and took it like a man. A robot, more like it.

But it was also that same night when I got the CADC rejection email that I realized that under this “masculine façade,” I am nothing. There are no layers in my character to peel back. The masculine façade has become my personality. The accusation that I’m trying to butch things up is preceded by the assumption (or expectation) that, as a gay guy, I have some kind of more emotional and expressive side. That assumption in itself is a gay stereotype. And for me, it’s one that is not true. Not anymore, at least. I’m the way I am because that’s just how I am.

However, I still can’t deny the fact that my character is flawed, that something is wrong. And the problem is more deeply rooted than just refusing/not being able to feel any sad emotions. The main question is, what is the problem? I don’t know.

I’ve never fully come to terms with being gay. I never thought I’d be able to, and I never thought that I’d need to. But maybe the problem is that I really do need to.

The total amount of time I’ve spent hanging out with straight guys (Kevin, Alfonso, and other dancers) is probably more than my senior year in high school and first year in college combined. It’s been ridiculously fun, but I still feel a sense of loneliness. I’m wondering if I need a strong group of gay friends too to fulfill that hole. Maybe this is the problem. I used to be able to go to Cameron for gay friends, but I don’t hang out with his gay friends unless I’m hanging out with him, and Cameron is too busy with his internship and gay frat nowadays. If I go out into the gay world looking for friends, I need to go on my own. And then somehow, I’ll finally fully accept myself.

I dunno. This is getting convoluted. I’m looking for some kind of answer, but I don’t even have the question fully formed in my mind. Being the anxious person I am, however, I can’t wait for that question to form. My urge is too strong, so I’m going to form the question over time while I search. Fortunately, I already know where to start looking.

---
“My DowneLife”
Written March 5th, 2006 (Excerpted)

Among all the private messaging and stuff, I've only actually talked to [a few] from DowneLink on AIM so far.

The first guy was rather interesting... He's black, he's a senior at Independence High, he's... interesting. And by interesting, I mean he kept on talking about jacking off and penises. He said his was... 8 inches long. oh god.. =/ And then he asked me if I had a digital camera. I said yes [[how did it not strike me that I should’ve lied?]], and then he started bothering me about showing him pictures of my penis. I tried to be as nice about it as possible, saying stuff like, "Taking pictures of my penis makes me feel really weird, sorry! =)" I'm just glad he didn't show me pictures of his 8-inch black cobra.

The second guy, I only talked to for five minutes. He asked me my age, to which I responded 15. He was disappointed and told me, "Oh, I can't talk to you. You're too young." My DowneLink profile says I'm 18 because that's the required minimum age; I hate having to lie about my age and misleading people like that... And... Apparently I'm "too young"... was this guy looking to have sex with me or what? =/
---

And no, the answer/question doesn’t involve sex or relationships.

Stoic

“The Ides of March”
Written March 16th, 2008 (Excerpted)

I parked in Trung’s driveway and shot out of my car. Trung greeted me at his door, but we didn’t waste any time for anything else. I rushed up the stairs to Trung’s computer and found that the Internet was still logged onto Trung’s UCSD application account. There was a huge “Congratulations!” plastered on the page.

I sat down in the chair, logged out of Trung’s account, and logged onto mine, being extra careful to not make any typos that would further delay when I would find out the results.

While the page was loading, I turned to Trung, who was beside me now, and pulled him in closely. Ivan stood silently in the doorway, watching.

The page loaded. Trung and I immediately glued our eyes to the screen and began reading.

I didn’t have to spend a lot of time reading. The key words were already jumping out at me. I fell back into the chair. Trung was still reading the page.

“Trung,” I began, “You can stop reading. I didn’t get in. We’re not going to the same college.”
---

Six hours remained until the CADC roster would appear on the website. I still hadn’t received a call, and it was driving me crazy. I didn’t want to do anything all day; fortunately I didn’t have to really until I had my only class of the day from 6 to 7:20, social dance. I was thinking of telling the teacher that I was sick and highly contagious (which I really was) and sitting out, but I decided that it would be better to try to get my mind off the auditions at the cost of several other girls’ health.

When my turn came to dance with Hillary, one of the CADC captains, I knew that CADC wasn’t the subject to bring up. We chatted and bantered as we normally would, but there was still that sense of awkwardness that came from something that both of us tried to not bring up even though it was at the top of our minds.

I thought maybe, since three CADC auditionees shared the same class with one of the captains, if any one of us made it then maybe after class, that captain and the rest of the cabinet would come and congratulate us in person. But that didn’t happen. No one popped out from around the corner and Kevin, Alfonso, and I walked out of that class solemnly, still waiting for our calls.

At 7:30, we sat down at dinner and ate in silence. The anticipation was killing us; I could see it in Kevin and Alfonso’s faces and I could feel it in mine. Alfonso explained to us that he heard Hillary telling Jojo in class that she felt “bad for them,” and we debated what that possibly could have meant. Alfonso convinced that she was referring to us, and that she felt bad because the judges had chosen none of us.

“Fuck!” he yelled out. “What did we do wrong? The next time I see Hillary, I just want to ask her what we did wrong.”

Alfonso was normally a chill guy, and I really hated seeing him like this. I had always been really terrible at cheering people up, but I tried something. ““CADC likes to screw around with the people they accept,” I said. “Maybe Hillary wanted you to hear to mess with your mind. Or maybe you heard her wrong.”

Alfonso didn’t respond.

“Plus, you know David Lee? The really really good short Asian guy with the mohawk who’s definitely going to get in?” I asked. “I’ve been regularly checking his Facebook—stalkerish, I know, but whatever—he still hasn’t gotten a call yet either. So CADC is still in the process of making their calls. Don’t lose hope.”

Don’t lose hope. That sounded weird coming from me. I knew that out of the three of us, I was the least likely to get in, but at the same time, I needed as much comfort as Kevin and Alfonso did.

After dinner, Kevin left us to go study, and Alfonso and I met up with Asian John to attend the MCIA workshop at the Mesa Parking Garage. I also called up Sang to come join us. At the workshops, however, I could barely concentrate or put in any energy. Every five minutes or so I’d pull out my cell phone to make sure that I had reception and that I didn’t miss any calls. It was like I could only put my energy into that. I looked over at Alfonso and he looked back, and we both shared an understanding that this was not the night to learn a piece. He went over to the corner by the staircase, and I joined him. Asian John and Sang followed.

After the workshop finished around 9:30, we stood around outside in front of the garage discussing what to do. Alfonso was going to meet up with Kevin and some others at Panyia’s place at CV since our apartments at VDC and VDC Norte were going through a schedule power outage. Earlier during the day I had asked Sang to come wait with all of us and other CADC people for our phone calls, and he sounded excited about that. However, when I later met up with Kevin and Alfonso for class, Kevin expressed that he would rather not see any of the newly accepted dancers. I understood, but I didn’t want to abandon Sang, especially after dragging him out to the MCIA workshops. And plus, for the sake of my sanity, I had to be around someone happy and someone who wasn’t freaking the fuck out about CADC. Maybe it would make time pass by less slowly and less agonizingly.

Once the plans were settled, Alfonso and I shook hands and nodded at each other.

“Good luck, Alfonso.” I still had hope for Alfonso, so I thought of this moment as shaking hands and saying goodbye to the old, non-CADC Alfonso. Tomorrow when I would see him, he’d already be a new person.

Asian John followed Alfonso, and Sang and I went back to his dorm to chill. I sat on his bed as he checked his email at his desk. Being the curious hound I was, I tried to milk out every little detail about Sang’s acceptance phone call from CADC. I wanted to understand it enough so that I could live the experience like he did, but Sang fed me scraps. He only shrugged and smiled modestly.

“Fuck Sang! You made it into FUCKING CADC! You’re all going to have a formal dinner Thursday tomorrow and meet your family for the rest of the entire school year and possibly your entire college life! Why aren’t you more excited?” I demanded.

“I got a midterm Friday morning,” he responded coolly.

I sighed and shook my head. If I were him, I’d still be jumping off the walls and shitting in the showers like I was the shit. But instead, here I was. And here Sang was.

Around 10:15, I asked to use his computer to check David Lee’s facebook, and my heart raced as I read posts on his walls. There were congratulatory posts from his friends. Recent. Within the last fifteen minutes. I immediately texted Alfonso to tell him that David Lee just got in, and then I waited. If there was a call coming for me, it’d be coming within an hour.

11:15 came, and I was losing hope. Sang had gone from telling me, “Don’t worry, there’s still time. You’ll get a call!” to “Auditions for MCIA are coming up!”

I lied across his bed and he handed me a TV remote. I flipped through some channels and was temporarily excited to see Scully in big circular lens glasses and holding one of those big bulky 1990 cordless phones. It was the episode with the cockroaches. I watched as Sang recounted details about the drama that Funksters had last year. I don’t know how that came up; maybe he was telling me all that as a way cheering me up. I wouldn’t have to deal with the drama associated with dance crews. Big woohoo.

Around 11:40, I checked my email once again, not expecting much. But a certain email caught my eye. I read the title out loud to Sang: “To CADC Auditionee.”

That was it. I knew I wasn’t in. It definitely wasn’t an acceptance email, because they would only accept dancers by phone. And plus, there was something about the sound of “auditionee.” That eeeeeee sound. It sounded to calm and unexciting. I didn’t hesitate to open the email and read it, as I already knew what was inside. Yep, one fat paragraph of a rejection masked by apologies and cheap comfort words.

Sang waited for my response, but I only shrugged and forced a meek smile.

Examining the email again, I noticed that I could see a list of all of the people who received the email. I skimmed through looking for Kevin and Alfonso’s emails, and I was dismayed to see both of them in the list. I called Alfonso to tell him the news, and I kept it short because I didn’t know how to comfort him. The truth was the truth, and I had always been bad at masking it.

After I hung up, I leaned back and continued watching X-Files.

“Brian, how are you feeling?”

I thought about Sang’s question for a bit. Then I thought about it hard. I looked deep inside myself for an answer, for some soul. In my mind I flashed through three separate times that I should have cried this summer but refused to. That was when I made a stunning revelation that struck me harder than the actual rejection from CADC.

I furrowed my eyebrows and shook my head.

“I don’t feel sad,” I began. “I don’t feel anything at all. Nothing.” I scoffed in disbelief. Nothing.

I had stifled my emotions for so long that I couldn’t even recognize them anymore. Something was wrong with me.

Empathy

Six hours remained until the CADC roster would appear on the website. He still hadn’t received a call, and it was driving him crazy. All he wanted to do was to sit down and wait for it, but now here he was in his Social Dance class, a class that he shared with his Kevin, me, Jojo, a girl who was already in CADC, and Hillary, one of CADC’s team captains.

As he stood next to Hillary waiting for instructions from the teacher, he tried so hard to get into Hillary’s mind and probe it with questions. Is the cabinet still deciding on who to choose? Do you already know the roster? Am I on the roster?

Standing next to her, he instead thought that he might’ve accidentally overheard her telling Jojo how she felt “bad for them.”

His heart sank, and he felt his head run hot as it filled with more questions. Did I hear her right? Who’s she referring to? Kevin, Brian, and me?

The teacher introduced a few news spins, and so, trying to concentrate, he shoved the questions as far back into his mind as he could.

Some time during that class though, he came to accept that the possibility of not getting into CADC was very, very real. As he, Kevin, and I ate in the dining commons after class around 7:30, he explained what he thought he overheard and yelled out, “Fuck! What did we do wrong? The next time I see Hillary, I just want to ask her what we did wrong.”

He waited on us for an answer. There was silence, and then a meek proposition. “CADC likes to screw around with the people they accept,” I said. “Maybe Hillary wanted you to hear to mess with your mind. Or maybe you heard her wrong.”

No, he knew he heard her right.

“Plus, you know David Lee? The really really good short Asian guy with the mohawk who’s definitely going to get in? I’ve been regularly checking his Facebook—stalkerish, I know, but whatever—he still hasn’t gotten a call yet either. So CADC is still in the process of making their calls. Don’t lose hope.”

He looked at me like it was one of the very few things I had ever said that made sense. How strange it was, he thought, to hear “don’t lose hope” from me when that was what he was telling me two weeks ago. So maybe there was still a reason to believe.

After dinner, he and I left Kevin and met up with Asian John to attend a free dance workshop from MCIA, another one of UCI’s dance teams. The main goal was to distract himself, to pass another hour feeling as little pain as possible.

But he couldn’t get into the choreo. It required too much energy and swagger, something that he didn’t have this night. He looked over at me, and we caught each other’s stares. Seeing my empty face and lack of energy, he could tell that I wasn’t in the mood either. He went to the corner and sat down by the staircase, and Asian John and I followed. My friend Sang came over to joined us.

He looked up at Sang and wasn’t too sure what to feel about him. Sang already got a call from CADC while he didn’t. Should he be envious of Sang? Jealous? Angry? Happy? At the very least, he shook Sang’s hand and told him, “Congratulations, man.”

When the workshop finished around 9:30, he, Asian John, Sang, and I stood around outside in the cold discussing what to do. There was a scheduled blackout from 9 to 6 AM at VDC and VDC Norte, the apartments. He had planned on going to Panyia’s place, where there was power and where he was going to meet back up with Kevin and several other friends waiting for their calls from CADC. I, however, seemed intent on going back to Sang’s dorm, so he extended his hand out to me, ready to bid farewell. As I reached out and shook his hand, he nodded at me, and I nodded back.

“Good luck, Alfonso,” I told him.

He and Asian John turned away from Sang and me, and we walked our separate ways.

Shortly after getting to Panyia’s place, he got a text from me saying that David Lee just got an acceptance phone call from CADC. This gave him and Kevin yet more reason to hope, to get excited, and to get nervous. Any one of them could be getting a phone call too in the next few minutes. He prayed for it.

When more minutes passed without hearing his phone ring, he further tried to rationalize why he hadn’t gotten a phone call yet. It could be one of CADC’s pranks: to make two or three more calls five minutes right before putting up the roster. But as the hour hand crawled closer toward 12, the prayers and the rationalizations grew weaker, making more room now for heartacheand self-criticism.

Around 11:45, he had already nearly finished the process of mourning and reached acceptance when his phone rang. With one last shred of hope remaining, he leaped up and reached for his phone, his heart racing. However, it wasn’t the phone call he was hoping for, and it wasn’t the phone call that he would want to hear. As he picked up his phone, he was disappointed to see that the phone call wasn’t coming from anyone on CADC.

“Hey Brian, what’s up?”

“Did you check your email?” I asked him.

“No, why?”

“I got the email,” I sighed. “The rejection email.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“And, well, you know how when the sender sends out a mass email and you can see a list of all the emails he sent it to?”

Fuck, fuck no. He wish he didn’t know what I was talking about, but he saw where this was going. “Yeah,” he answered.

“Your email is on that list. And so is Kevin’s.”

I said it like I was saying something as typical as, “I bought some milk from Albertsons.” I delivered the information so nonchalantly that he didn’t know how to react with anything more than just, “Oh, alright. Thanks for telling me.”

“Sorry man, so I’ll see ya tomorrow or at the next dance workshop?”

“Yeah, sure,” he answered. I hung up, and Alfonso knew that was it. No CADC this year.



At the beginning of the last school year, Alfonso heard that KASA, the Korean American Student Association, was in search of freshmen to join their club and compete in a freshmen dance-off of several Korean clubs from different schools around SoCal. KASA had to put together a dance team comprised only of first-years, and they had to perform a six-minute set. This was just like any other dance competition, except anyone could dance in the team as long as they auditioned for their part and got casted. Alfonso was just getting into breakdancing, but he thought he might give choreo a try. And he was glad he did.

Through KASA, Alfonso got a sense of what being on an actual dance team was like. He met new friends, he learned and cleaned pieces, and he auditioned and got casted for them. As the competition came closer, the directors scheduled “hell week” practices, and that was when he really bonded with his KASA teammates. They practically lived in a parking garage as they practiced through the night until the sun came up. They barely got any sleep, and together they shared their pains and miseries and questioned why the hell they were putting themselves through all this. But in the end, it was worth it when their team won second place.

That sense of family. Seeing all your effort go somewhere. That feeling of performing on stage. The sense of victory (and slight disappointment) when hearing his team name called out. That only came in small doses with KASA, as the KASA dance team existed solely for this once-a-year dance-off competition. Alfonso knew he wanted more. And he was going to do whatever it took to get it.



“I always thought that those who succeeded were the ones who worked hard...I guess it’s still not my turn to shine.”

“The beginning of a whole new year to improve...now where do I start?”

What It All Comes Down To

CADC was supposed to have already posted up the roster, but they decided to postpone it to Wednesday night, 11:59 PM. However, some dancers have already gotten calls and know that they’re on the team.

Neither Alfonso, Kevin, nor I have gotten any calls. We’re trying to rationalize: there’s another 24 hours of waiting, so that gives them another 24 hours to call one of us.

Although, honestly, I just want it to be over. I just want that roster to be up, whether or not my name’s in it. With the roster up, I can prepare myself for what’s coming, because as of right now, I honestly have no idea how my life’s going to look starting Thursday.

My friend Sang, who I met through Funksters, was one of the very few that already got a call. He’s officially in CADC, and I’m fucking happy for him. But I immediately felt my heart sink a little. I felt a sense of loss.

I want CADC badly. I want to dance. I want to perform. I want to grow. I want to meet new people.

But, in my heart, I know what this all really comes down to: I don’t want to be alone.

If Kevin and Alfonso make it and I don’t, I might start finding myself alone in my apartment room in front of the laptop every day while they’re off at practicing or hanging out with Sang and the rest of CADC.

---
“I’m Losing Oakridge”
Written December 3rd, 2006 (Excerpted)

Things have really changed lately among me, Peter, Miranda and John.

Normally, Peter comes back from Davis to San Jose every weekend so he could visit his girlfriend, but now with them no longer together, no one forces Peter to come visit anymore. So Peter is pretty much going to be missing in action from now on.

Miranda, she just kinda faded out. Every time me and John decide to go hang out, she has work or classes. We’ve been all talking about hanging out together for a while now, but nothing has ever happened.

It’s strange. The way it used to be was that I would go to Oakridge and expect to find Peter, John, or Miranda upstairs in the arcade, and then we would go chill downstairs or go driving off to somewhere else: Taco Bell, The Gate, BillyJr’s Apartment, MGL, SVGL, our houses, Valley Fair, Eastridge, etc.

Now it’s just me and John. I admit that I’ve been slightly expecting something to also knock John out of the picture, leaving me alone. Or, something would knock me out of the picture. I was more worried about the latter because things already seemed like John was moving on with a new cast of friends.

And now, since I wanna sleep early so I can wake up early to do homework, I’ll post up the conversation that I had with Kaleb where I decribed what happened Friday night, which I already made a few references to in the previous entry.

[The following is a condensed and grammatically corrected version of what I told Kaleb on AIM.]
Things have been moving quickly indeed, and I thought I’ve been moving along with them. John got into breakdancing and joined hip hop club at Leland, and so I got into breakdancing. Sometimes John drives me along to hip hop club practice and I became familiar with all his breakdancing friends. Weekends, we hang out, go to Oakridge, drive around, stay out late at night. Everybody has been getting their ears pierced, so I decided that would like to get mine pierced too.

So John and I were hanging out at Oakridge. After some DDR, we met up with his friends Yang and Pat. Now, I’ve noticed in the past that when John’s other friends are present, I get slightly different treatment from John. Like, when it’s just the two of us, I’d be his Top 1 on myspace, when John’s other friends show up, I’m suddenly like #20.

I told John that I had to be home and into bed pretty early because I’m waking up early Saturday to run a discussion panel on sexual orientation at my school and I had to prepare speeches and shit. We and his friends all went to Valley Fair, and I asked to be home by 11ish. However, we visited John’s friend’s friend at their apartment in Santana Row. At this point, I was starting to get a super crazy headache that almost topped the one I had the first time I got drunk.

But we still end up at that guy’s apartment in Santana Row and we all decide to play some game on their Xbox360. Incidentally, video games don't make headaches better, and so I finally decided to sit out. But then John was like, “Dude, just play. At least move your character so that we can move along.” Ignoring him, I leaned back into the couch and rubbed my head.

Then while playing the game, Pat says, “Ow, my ears are starting to sting a bit.” (He just got his ears pierced that day.) To which John responds urgently, “Do you have the rubbing alcohol? How bad is it?” etc. It was a small little ear ache compared to my huge headache.

After an hour, they were done with the video games, it was 11. Then they John and his friends decided to practice breakdancing shit on the floors of the apartment. They pranced around for another hour. I finally ended up back home at 12:30. [This ends the excerpt of the conversation with Kaleb.]

All I could think about during the car ride home was the drunken vomiting incident at MGL 9 months ago and how things have changed since then. It was finally okay for John to ask my how I was feeling once he dropped of Yosuke and Pat.

I didn’t say anything to John until we finally arrived at my house. As I was getting out, I told John, “This headache was the same one from when I was drunk at Milpitas Golfland. Same one. Same symptoms. Same almost-wanna-vomit feelings, but you’re lucky that I didn’t [vomit]. But this time, the main concern was over somebody’s ear. Tell your Leland friend that I’m sorry that his ear slightly stings.” I could tell that John didn’t really know what to say because for the first time ever, I was taking things absolutely seriously with him. No joking, no “classic” dumb me.

“Good night, Yohannes.” [Yohannes is John’s real name, which all of his Leland friends address him as.]

Normally, an angry person would slam the car door, but I was smart and clever enough to leave it slightly ajar so that John would have to handle the hassle of getting out of the drivers seat to close it himself.

And yeah, I now feel like shit because I don’t actually want things to end that way between us. Don’t bother giving me advice because Kaleb already gave me the only good advice there is. [[I was kinda at a flirty stage with Kaleb at this time.]]